Sharing Metadata Between Oracle EPM and Data Warehouse and ERP

In a previous article, we talked about the challenges of sharing metadata between OneStream, your data warehouse, and your enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Now, let’s take a look at how the additional complexity of a multi-tool performance management solution such as Oracle EPM affects metadata sharing across your environment.

Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is a popular suite of enterprise-grade planning, budgeting, and reporting applications. Oracle EPM and OneStream essentially fill the same role for enterprise customers; however, unlike OneStream, Oracle EPM is highly segmented. 

Within Oracle EPM, there is one product for consolidations, one product for account reconciliations, and one product for planning, among others. Within each of these "technologies", there might be additional applications. That creates numerous different places you need to maintain and share metadata just within the Oracle EPM landscape.

Why Sharing Metadata Between Applications Matters

Sharing validated and governed metadata across all applications helps ensure that consistent information about master data, including accounts, entities, cost centers, products, projects, and employees, is aligned when a request is made.

In Oracle EPM applications, metadata must be in place before loading data; otherwise, data loads fail, and account reconciliation errors can occur. These traditional approaches to sharing metadata (manual, file based, email) between Oracle EPM applications are time-consuming and error-prone. 

Manual Processes

In many organizations, change requests for metadata are captured manually by system administrators who receive Excel templates or IT help desk tickets via email from business users. Others use SharePoint to capture metadata requests and submit changes for approval.  

Although these methods may be acceptable for a time, both approaches leave plenty of room for error, and they don’t scale well. A common issue most administrators face is properly understanding the true impact of a metadata change. Not many help desk applications can adequately capture the hierarchy position of a member in it's primary and alternate structures, causing reconciliation issues. And at some point, your business application environment is likely to reach the point that manually managing metadata is no longer possible.

When metadata is not fully validated for all applications, requests may go back and forth with business users for clarification, adding extra time to the creation process and providing additional opportunities for data entry mistakes. These errors cause reporting discrepancies between financial and other business-critical systems, leading to unnecessary effort and reconciliation during close.

Interface Table or Data Warehouse Links

Using interface tables or data warehouse links from ERP to EPM or from data warehouse to EPM applications can be highly inefficient. This is usually the first type of automation that is built when facing a volume of changes, to ease the manual metadata update process. While this may ease the initial burden of moving metadata between systems, very few interfaces are able to properly enforce governance logic needed to maintain metadata integrity. 

Interface tables are not usually built to analyze and populate all attributes / validate all governance rules for metadata subscription. EPM metadata often needs additional enrichment for members to calculate or aggregate properly. 

Alternate hierarchies also need to be maintained across applications, which means ownership may need to be assigned to various business teams, increasing complexity and inefficiency.

What sharing metadata with ease really boils down to is that analysts and financial users want data available as fast as possible. Inaccessible, inaccurate, or untrustworthy metadata can cause bottlenecks that slow down the retrieval of critical results from business and financial applications. These delays prevent analysts and other data-dependent users from extracting insights from the data, which in turn impacts business outcomes, innovation, and time to value.

EPMware Simplifies Sharing Metadata Across Oracle EPM, Data Warehouse, and Your ERP

With a large Oracle EPM landscape, users may find it nearly impossible to manage complexity and protect data integrity when sharing metadata across multiple business applications, data warehouse, and ERPs.

Unlike other metadata management solutions, EPMware helps alleviate complexity and risk by creating the validated and approved metadata to ensure data loads do not fail. This metadata-first approach ensures the data can be pushed out across all applications with confidence that the transactions won’t fail and increases availability of data to business users. 

Other EPMware features that help streamline metadata sharing across your entire business and reporting application environment include:

• Centralized Metadata Management
  EPMware authors and pushes metadata to all subscribing applications and waits for successful confirmation that the metadata is live and ready for data loading or reporting.
  
  
• Out-of-the-Box Integration and Real-Time Validation
  EPMware includes target adapters and real-time validations for all Oracle EPM and many ERP and CPM applications out of the box.
  
  
• Workflow and Governance
  SOX-compliant systems need metadata change approvals to be trackable and transparent. EPMware keeps audit-ready records of all changes, from any user, with historical hierarchy versioning built in.

EPMware Increases ROI for Oracle EPM Customers

Within Oracle EPM, two solutions—DRM and EDM—offer similar functionality to EPMware, but they lack the flexibility, scalability, and efficiency of EPMware’s unified solution. EPMware’s centralized, integrated platform ensures that the metadata that precedes data loads are accessible, accurate, and trustworthy, so analysts and business and financial users have fast, reliable access to the critical data they need.

EPMware adds value to Oracle EPM workflows by putting metadata management and data governance capabilities in a single product. With unlimited node enterprise pricing and the ability to connect your cloud and your on-premises applications, your organization can quickly maximize its investment in Oracle EPM.

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